Vatican authority comments on euthanasia law in Luxembourg

The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, said this week, “Life is not something negotiable,” and no politician or political party can attack its inviolability and sacredness.

In a recent editorial published by the Italian bishops’ daily newspaper “Avvenire,” Archbishop Fisichella commented on the recent law allowing euthanasia in Luxemburg, which was opposed by the Grand Duke Henry I. He noted that a person who “gives in to the desire for death opens the doors to expediency and undermines the foundation of social and civil life.”

The archbishop also said that every Catholic lawmaker “must in conscience oppose a law that upholds the legitimacy of euthanasia. The freedom of the lawmaker affects the common good when his political choice is based on a relativistic concept that confuses as licit all positions in the name of individual freedom.”

After explaining that no parliamentarian institution can hide behind fallacies when it is called to legislate on the beginning and the end of life, the archbishop explained that all life must be defended and that often cited “principle of self-determination” can only be “an act by which one chooses life and never death. Otherwise we would be making an arbitrary choice that has nothing to do with freedom.”